Museum Worlds

Many readers will be familiar with the healthy discussion among ICOM (International Council of Museums) members about the role of museums that ran from 2019 and resulted in the 2022 definition: “A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.” The contributions to this issue of Museum Worlds demonstrate a range of ways in which museums of all shapes and sizes and in all parts of the world exemplify this definition. Without wishing to reignite the debate by critiquing a definition that is the result of many hours of considered discussion, we nonetheless note that the 2022 definition treats “the museum” as an institution without taking into account the significant role of the many individuals who together work to make up the whole. We are therefore pleased that the people who are critical to the running of a museum is a key theme running through Museum Worlds 13.

This article explores the everyday challenges of collaboration between community groups and heritage organizations in England. I explore how political and ideological debates about the moral principles of repatriation (and the legal and bureaucratic frameworks that continue to bolster colonial ownership and circumscribe community relations to cultural heritage) are managed within everyday working practices, conversations, and ways of being within partnerships. I focus specifically on the challenges faced by community groups to find a form that is both recognized and useful within this fraught cultural work. I write as both an anthropologist, and a long-term member of a community association, Te Maru o Hinemihi, that has been working for more than 15 years with the National Trust, the UK and Europe's largest heritage charity advocating for the care and return home of the Māori ancestress Hinemihi.

The preservation of China's vast national heritage, particularly its expansive archaeological sites, presents a significant challenge. In response, China has created National Archaeological Parks as a strategic approach to balance heritage conservation with urban planning needs. This article delves into the genesis of this initiative within the Chinese government, tracking the evolution of priorities in heritage conservation and exploring the diverse perspectives of stakeholders involved. Additionally, it examines the meticulous selection process employed in designating national archaeological parks. Furthermore, it offers a focused case study of the establishment of the National Yinxu Archaeological Park to illuminate the intricacies of this process. Through this analysis key insights emerge regarding the complexities and ongoing challenges inherent in the creation and management of such parks.

How should living exhibitions end? In this article, I discuss this unresolved paradox within the context of ending a living exhibition. The article does not seek practical solutions but rather embraces the paradox as an opportunity to reimagine endings at museums. I begin by proposing to rethink endings challenging the ideas of cultural afterlives and immortality and offering the concept of alterlives. I then put the concept to work as I develop a materially infused “catalog” of the multiple endings of an actual living exhibition following how objects, organisms, and art installations turn into multiple things. I end speculating the unknown futures of things falling apart and the generative nature of such dizzying endings.

This article argues for the potential of eclectic display, the critical juxtaposition of cross-disciplinary and achronological objects, to un-discipline the museum and allow existing collections to tell new stories. In response to sector-wide calls for new approaches to heritage, we suggest the value of literary studies both in identifying entrenched narratives, particularly those invoked by chronological organization and disciplinary divisions, and in offering new narratological structures (repetitive, marginal, peripatetic) that would complement and complicate existing, dominant narratives in museum display (such as progress or relationality). Though it is traditionally viewed as unruly or outmoded, we suggest instead that eclecticism could be an important tool for museums to respond to calls for change, such as decolonization, and contemporary crises, like the climate crisis, in an agile and cost-effective manner.

Access to museum careers and the nature of a “successful” career is shaped by individuals, communities, and global historical forces. This special section explores the exclusions, practices, negotiations, and reshapings that have impacted museum workers’ professional identities and professional trajectories over time and in different parts of the world. This introduction identifies key themes illuminated through the articles and commissioned “In conversation” pieces selected here: we show how identities are relational, as museum workers are made—and find both support and disadvantage—through their relationships inside and outside the museum. We identify the histories and legacies of the hierarchies and power relations implicit in the very idea of the “museum professional,” deconstructing notions of amateurism, expertise and authority, and examining the intersection of the professional and the personal.

Sydney Keith-Falconer, Countess of Kintore (1851–1932), collected natural history specimens for her private museum. Her accounts of a visit to the Caribbean record her search for specimens and practical skills. Mrs. L. Latour worked in an administrative capacity for the Victoria Institute, Trinidad, from 1895 until at least 1901. The two women met briefly at the institute in 1898. Mrs. Latour's career offers evidence for a woman of color as a museum professional in nineteenth-century Trinidad. The countess's accounts of her own museological practices offer a narrative of anxious knowledge combined with the confident articulation of colonial hierarchies at the expense of Mrs. Latour. These narratives emphasize how the intersections of marginalized experiences in museums can reinforce barriers to museum practice and hierarchies of knowledge within museums.

This article explores precarity and resilience in Chen Wanli's pursuit of a museum career. Through a critical biography approach, the article examines Chen's professional development in three stages through his work as a physician at Peking University (1917–1927), his tenure as a provincial head of public health (1928–1949), and his career at the Palace Museum (1949–1969). It details how Chen negotiated various professions to become a museum archaeologist, how he acquired the competences necessary for a museum career, and how his critical biography reveals the sociopolitical conditions of the museum profession in twentieth-century China. Investigating his transnational networks, the article also demonstrates how Chen became a powerhouse of ceramic archaeology and knowledge dissemination, contributing to the training of generations of Chinese museum professionals.

This article highlights key eras of labor organizing among art museum workers in the United States, revealing a long tradition of radical reimaginings of the cultural sector and society writ large. Drawing on archival research, the article examines the earlier struggles and successes of the 1930s, when the Brooklyn Museum Unit of the Communist Party urged its members to “stick together this time. It's the one and only method that gets results,” through to the 1970s. A fundamental tension within these movements derives from the “professional” identity of much museum work. Loyalty to “white collar” identities established legacies that undermined political agendas and inhibited cross-class solidarity. This historical investigation therefore serves as both a blueprint and a warning for contemporary museum activists working to build new coalitions. Organizing for paradigmatic change within the sector and beyond necessitates engaging with these legacies, both positive and negative, to enact sustainable transformations.

This interview, recorded in January 2025, is based on a presentation that took place as part of the Making Museum Professionals: Transnational Forces workshop. In it, Bonita Bennett discusses her career working at the community-led District Six Museum in South Africa, from 2001 to the present day. The conversation considers her experiences in teaching, community advocacy and activism, and the different roles in which she has served, from volunteer through to executive director and now freelance consultant. The discussion interrogates and challenges sector norms of professionalization and professional identity, emphasizing how the values of democracy, activism, and human rights might shape the museum sector for change.

Since the 1990s, museum conservators have endeavored to minimize pesticide use in collections care, using techniques known as Integrated Pest Management (IPM). Reading materials for Preventive Conservation: Museum Collections and Their Environment—a 1990 Getty Conservation Institute training course that introduced conservators to IPM—this article examines how IPM reconfigures the work of conservators, showing how concepts and processes from outside the museum have fundamentally reshaped their work, identity, and source of authority. Now more than ever, conservation staff must strategically manage both other staff and the museum building itself to prevent intrusions and address infestations. Imported to the heritage sector from agriculture, IPM is presented as a nonviolent and earth-friendly alternative to pesticide use, but its “excessive” techniques operate in an economy of death.

This article explores the work of front-of-house staff as mediators, specifically considering their professional experiences of navigating controversial debates. Drawing from museum organizational studies, this article presents a case study of the Visitor Experience team at the Wellcome Collection, London, and how they mediated the closure of the exhibition, Medicine Man. It situates their practice within a web of internal and external communications and considers the implications of their positioning as front-of-house staff within the wider process of mediation: as representatives of the organization, as experts on visitor behavior, and as advocates for visitors. The findings highlight the factors that determine the work of front-of-house staff as mediators, including organizational structures, perceptions of visitor expectations, and the implicit hierarchies present in the heritage sector. The article provides analysis of museum workers’ perspectives on contemporary concerns in the heritage sector around the management of controversies.

This conversation was recorded in July 2024 and is based on an interview that took place as part of the Making Museum Professionals: Transnational Forces workshop. In it, Professor Bénédicte Savoy talks to Calixte Biah, Curator at the Musée d'Histoire de Ouidah, Benin, about his career and the impact of restitution on the work of museum curators in Benin. The conversation looks back at Biah's experience as a museum curator at the heart of the restitution of 26 treasures of Benin's heritage and is supported by Savoy's expertise in histories and legacies of repatriation. Their discussion foregrounds the question of professional expertise and training in museum careers and serves to show the growth and extent of museum training in Africa. It highlights how professionals in Africa benefit from career development in pan-African and global networks, not just with their former European colonizer.

The colonial-era extraction of cultural belongings and treasures from the continent of Africa by colonial agents contributed to the globalization of African material cultures. Through the actions of traders, mariners, missionaries, soldiers, engineers, administrators, their families, and others associated with colonization, huge quantities of African material culture entered global circulation, eventually being amassed in private and public collections primarily in North America and Europe. In recent years, this situation has led to growing calls for the repatriation and restitution of African belongings and treasures (Sarr and Savoy 2018) and the return of some collections have slowly taken place (see, for example, “Jesus College returns Benin Bronzes World First” 2021; see also Zetterstrom and Wingfield 2019). In addition, there have been concurrent calls for museums to practice proactive transparency about their colonial-era collections, what they contain, where they came from, how they were obtained, and to research descendant community understandings of their cultural importance, and to communicate this widely, all as part of a wider process of decolonization (see, for example, “Our Statement on Decolonisation”; Museums Association 2025).

Digital technologies are reshaping how museums, archives, and galleries present their collections. Increasingly, exhibitions are supplemented with digital features or entirely realized in virtual formats. Digital exhibitions, as distinct online platforms, employ diverse design strategies to showcase objects. Research in this field has focused primarily on comparing the advantages and limitations of physical versus digital formats, alongside curatorial challenges, design strategies, and best practices concerning open access, accessibility, and diversity. Key studies (e.g., Kanellos et al. 2014; Schweibenz 2023; Siefkes 2022; Speakman et al. 2018) have analyzed various typologies of digital exhibitions or have analyzed specific examples of digital exhibition pages in detail, while anthologies like the one edited by Guido Fackler and Hendrikje Carius (2021) have provided interdisciplinary and methodological perspectives on the topic.

In the early hours of 26 March 2024, more than 30 people from Aotearoa New Zealand, Norfolk Island, and Scotland—and across the world—gathered for a dawn ceremony at Perth Museum. This ceremony imbued the mauri (life force) of years of collaborative work into a new display of taonga (cultural treasures) from Aotearoa New Zealand and and tao'a from Tahiti, part of the wider redevelopment and reopening of the new Perth Museum. The display encompasses five cases and an open section for the taonga Māori and, in a separate display section, a single case for an ‘ahu heva tūpāpa'u (Tahitian chief mourner's regalia). The taonga Māori include pounamu (greenstone), a kahu kākāpō (kākāpō feather cloak), weapons, taonga pūoro (musical instruments), and two carved poupou (house wall panels). The displays sit alongside a range of other new galleries displaying primarily local social history and archaeology and global material culture.

Berlin's recently opened Humboldt Forum, housed within the reconstructed Royal Hohenzollern Palace, endured an exceptionally difficult gestation. Beset by political, social, and architectural controversies, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Forum's virtual inauguration on 16 December 2020, followed by its public opening on 20 July 2021, affirmed the tenacity and resolve of its longtime supporters and the consensus between the different governments under which it was conceived, financed, and built (Humboldt Forum 2025).

In 2024, the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute (AGMI) organized and launched a small but compelling exhibition Armenian Woman: Victim and Heroine of the Armenian Genocide. Curated by AGMI director Dr. Edita Gzoyan, the exhibition occupies a single medium-sized gallery and sheds light on one of the lesser-studied aspects of the Armenian Genocide—the experiences of Armenian women. Through carefully selected artifacts, photographs, and personal narratives it offers a thought-provoking exploration of the dual role of women as victims of unimaginable atrocities and as heroines of survival and resistance. This exhibition is part of AGMI's series of temporary exhibitions. The museum itself is the most visited and well-known in Armenia, although the country remains relatively unfamiliar to many in the global museum community. Dedicated to the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1923, carried out in the Ottoman Empire, what is now Turkey, the museum plays a crucial role in preserving the memory of the genocide and educating visitors about its lasting impact. As a memorial museum, it serves not only as a site of remembrance but also as a space for reflection, understanding, and healing for the descendants of survivors.

In the field of museum studies there has been a regular chorus of scholars and industry-based professionals calling for practice-based placements for museum studies students. In order to prepare students for work in the museum and to apply key learnings to the field, their higher education learning needs to include placements, internships, field trips, and volunteering (Message 2023; Robenalt et al. 2022). Indeed, one of the four key pillars of museum studies training for a student, noted pioneering museologist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in this journal, is that “students should know what it takes to make a museum today, the various roles” (2019: 76). As a grouping of practitioners and scholars who have straddled both work in museums and teaching in the university, the authors have often made a similar call within the halls of our institutions. The push is so strong for museum studies students to gain work experience that we might even call this cornerstone of education in our field, a “signature pedagogy” as Lee Schulman (2005) once described it in the classic essay in educational research. As calls continue to be made for experience-based learning there is a trend in higher education that challenges these assumptions and assertions: the rapidly growing number of enrollments and completions of online museum studies students. Given the focus on graduate job-readiness, there needs to be greater discussion of how we can provide genuine museum-based online learning opportunities for our museum studies students and recent graduates.

This article examines how early childhood education (ECE) services in Aotearoa New Zealand can meaningfully engage with art museums under the Ministry of Education's Enriching Local Curriculum (ELC) scheme. Drawing on a range of research, professional practice insights, and case study data, it explores the pedagogical challenges and opportunities involved in supporting young children's cultural participation. A “third space” approach to art museum education is proposed to bridge differing expectations of ECE teachers and museum educators. The article highlights the importance of dialogue, flexibility, and shared planning to create learning experiences reflecting the values of Aotearoa New Zealand's early childhood curriculum while making full use of the gallery context. The findings support a co-constructive pedagogy that enhances children's well-being, expression, and sense of belonging through art.

In June 2024, a team of researchers and research collaborators visited the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) and Dartmouth College's Hood Museum of Art (Hood) to digitize Alaska Native heritage pieces from the Kawerak region. The research team for the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project CAREER: Three-Dimensional Modeling and Digital Repatriation of Arctic Indigenous Heritage in the Bering Strait Region of Alaska (#2327574) comprised six research assistants from the University of Missouri, alongside the principal investigator, a doctoral student from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, collaborators from the University of South Florida and Kawerak Inc., the Tribal nonprofit consortium of 20 federally recognized Tribes. Their objective was to 3D model and 2D photograph the Kawerak region collections. The Kawerak region, located in western Alaska, encompasses the approximate area from the village of Stebbins in the south, to the village of Shishmaref in the north, including the Bering Strait, most of the Seward Peninsula, and the islands of the northern Bering Sea. Before and during fieldwork, the research team consulted with nine Knowledge Holders via Zoom to understand what types of heritage pieces community members would be interested in digitizing (see figure 1).

A few years ago, I met Rachel Yates (Vaisala, Savai‘i), in the upstairs café of Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand to listen to her grand idea. Rachel, who was at that time Curator Pacific Cultures at Te Papa, had led the way for Te Papa's purchase (with the support of the Te Papa Foundation) of a very rare treasure: one of only 60 known copies of Alexander Shaw's tapa samplers (Rice and Lewis 2024). Alexander Shaw was a collector of many of the beautiful barkcloths that James Cook brought home after his visits to islands in the Pacific. Shaw cut up these cloths understanding their marketability due to European interest in “curiosities.” He published the books in 1787 as: A Catalogue of the different specimens of cloth collected in the three voyages of Captain Cook, to the Southern hemisphere: with a particular account of the manner of the manufacturing the same in various islands of the South Seas: partly extracted from Mr. Anderson and Reinhold Forster's Observations, and the verbal account of some of the most knowing of the navigators: with some anecdotes that happened to them among the natives. Today, these books are loosely known as “tapa samplers.” In my mind, to date, there has not been sufficient analysis of the samplers, nor have they been adequately considered in their entirety. Rachel, in her wisdom, saw something else missing in the writings and exhibitions of the tapa samplers held in collections around the world: the lack of engagement of today's Indigenous knowledge holders.

A dugout canoe sits at the center of the first gallery of the exhibition Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea (figure 1). It is fitting for its venue, the Mystic Seaport Museum, which is a pastiche of a nineteenth-century village and shipyard educating about the New England region's maritime history. As a white settler living in the area, I have visited the Museum over decades with family and on school and camp trips; I have come to understand it as an immersive experience of a largely whitewashed history.

“Think of Pitt Rivers as a pit,” begins Samoan/Welsh artist and performer James Nokise in front of a small group of people crowding the museum's balcony. The Pitt Rivers Museum, in all its glory, is suddenly reduced to a pit of stuff trying very hard to be “multicultural.” Our attention is then diverted to the vitrine to our left. One sees the image of contemporary Indigenous Australian artist Christian Thompson behind a mask of Captain James Cook looking straight ahead at some of the objects collected by Cook during his voyages in Oceania. “Let's hear from Cook,” says Nokise addressing Thompson's image while he drops the books in his hand in exaggerated frustration. Together with DJ Don Luchito, he begins the performance by questioning Cook, his “collecting,” and the foundation of the ethnographic museum as we know it today.

Collections Management as Critical Museum Practice Cara Krmpotich and Alice Stevenson, eds. London: UCL Press, 2024.

Analysing Museum Display: Theory and Method Christopher Whitehead. Abingdon: Routledge, 2025.

Too Jewish or Not Jewish Enough?: Ritual Objects and Avant-Garde Art at the Jewish Museum of New York Jeffrey Abt. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2024.

The Museum in Asia Yunci Cai, ed. Leicester Companions to Museum Studies. London: Routledge, 2025.

Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Heritage: Experiences of Return in Central Australia Jason M. Gibson. London: Routledge, 2024.